NCSoft "Security" Issues

I got up this afternoon around 3 and, true to my word, started installing City of Heroes. It downloaded some sort of launcher program first and then that started installing the game itself. I busied myself in other windows, screwing around in Galaxy Legion and playing some turns of board games on Yucata.

Suddenly my second monitor went black. (My computer is a laptop with a larger monitor connected via an HDMI port.) My laptop monitor flickered and came back with a drastically reduced resolution. Then my second monitor returned. I was a little freaked out, especially since nothing had popped up to indicate anything would be happening. Things were lagging but I managed to get to my desktop and change the resolution back. Then I looked and realized that City of Heroes had finished installing enough to launch itself in the background without telling me and took it on itself to wreck my display settings.

I went to that window and had a hard time moving around. It would seem it didn't realize that I'd changed the resolution back so if I wanted to click a button I had to move my mouse to where the client thought the button was instead of where the screen was showing it. Ok, fine. I manage to click the exit button after fighting for a few minutes and relaunch it. It screwed up my display again so I sucked that up and tried to log in. No go. I didn't know what my password was and it wasn't any of my standard ones circa 2005. Not too surprising I guess, so I went to the password recovery form. They know my email address (after all, they spammed me to get me to come back) so this should be a simple fix, right? Send a new password to my email address and let me play.

Nope. I enter my username in the password recovery form and they tell me I need to answer the security questions I chose when I created my account. I hate this sort of thing, but ok. What questions did I pick? My father's middle name and the name of the hospital where I was born.

WHAT?

I don't know the name of the hospital where I was born. I can't imagine 2005 Nick knew that either. On a whim I checked my birth certificate in case it said. Nope. Other than calling my mother and seeing if she knows I can't think of a way to get that information. There's no way I would have done that in 2005 to create a game account. Maybe I put in dummy information assuming I wouldn't need to use it? Regardless, there's no way I can get my account back via the form.

I found a way to contact support and sent them an email explaining my case and complaining that the form wouldn't let me get my account back. That was 5 hours ago with no response as yet. On the one hand it is the weekend and maybe they don't have people checking their support inbox right now. On the other hand they did just send out a recruiting email and needed to expect some people would try to log in and be unable to. I theorized that they sent the email on a Friday so I could spend my free weekend trying their game out again. Well, I can't do that because they're not letting me and it's not making me happy. I was willing to spend a couple hours trying the game again. Instead I've spent those hours installing software which screws with my display settings and trying to get back an account. It hasn't been fun and I'm pretty much giving up at this point.

The launcher listed some other games. Aion, Guild Wars, Lineage 2. Apparently they all use one master account like Blizzard's Battle.Net. So I can't play those games either. I did a little searching about this NCSoft master account and apparently it's a bit of a disaster. Apparently those security questions I couldn't answer? Added in on March, 2011. Which raises all kinds of questions... How did NCSoft find out my father's middle name? How do they know where I was born? How can they possibly justify keeping me out of my account for not knowing the answers to questions they made up? Do they not even want me to be able to recover my account?

I then found a horror story which is really hard to imagine happening. Apparently when you logged into your NCSoft master account it would sometimes log you in as someone else. Changing your password and other information once you were logged in didn't require reauthentication. So you'd log in as someone else and could then change their password to whatever you wanted. Which would give you access to their Aion account. And their CoH account. And their GW account... Sleazy people who figured this out would then log in and our of their account over an over until the site gave them access to someone else's account at which point they'd clean them out and repeat.

I'm just flabbergasted. The way they seem to handle security given those two things just blows my mind. I have so many games to play that I can't imagine giving these people my time or my money. One of my old WoW friends has been trying to convince me to play Guild Wars 2 when it comes out but it's an NCSoft title and I'm really not sure it's worth the risk. If I'm going to invest a lot of time into a character I want to be reasonably confident that character isn't just going to disappear one day, either to the system getting hacked or to the site randomly locking me out.